North American Fulfilment Started
6 months ago
– Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 08:20:22 AM
Hi Folks, great news, the North American fulfilment of the Dragon Eye Dice has begun. As some of you may have seen, the first batch of you have had their addresses locked and your parcels are on their way.
Boxes Leaving Portland
The fulfilment will be spread over three tranches, with the second and third being made up of a mix of current stock and replacements being manufactured in China. This covers pledges that include sets we do not have in Portland. Timings for the second and third tranches being sent out depends on how quickly the new replacements are ready at the factory. It is then our plan, to not only send out the rest of the world replacements from Asia, but also some North American backers where it is quicker to do so. If you haven’t had an email from Backer Kit, to the address you used to sign up for the campaign, do not worry as this means you are either in tranches two or three, or your email has gone into junk or has been filtered.
As we mentioned in previous updates, just under 40% of the overall delivery to Seattle was then rejected by our independent QC inspectors. This means that not all North American backers are able to be fulfilled in this first tranche or from our stock in the US. Rather than make replacements and then ship them over to the US, we will send these by airfreight directly to backers from Asia. The reason we cannot be specific yet as to who will get what and when, is we don’t know in what order the dice will be made in (i.e. what colour and cut will be ready first).
What we do know is that the factory has started making replacements, everyone who is waiting for their dice will be getting theirs, whether it be your first pledge or a replacement. We have seen some phenomenal samples of other variations of the dice and are certain the factory have finally got it right.
Now that fulfilment to North America has begun, we are excited to finally be able to release other projects that have been on hold during the production of the Dragon Eye Dice. Many of you have already signed up for the Dice Collectors Club and we will be releasing our first limited edition shortly. These are dice that were made alongside the final batch of Dragon Eye Dice (before we knew about the faulty dice) and so are already completed. They are in our warehouse and ready for dispatch.
We will also be running a phenomenal sale of our best-selling Level Up, prior to launching a new campaign early next year. So if you are looking for a great value Level Up before the holidays, we will be setting the new price live this weekend. For anyone waiting for the new Level Up-Evolved, that will be released early next year, all the improvements will be cross compatible with the original design.
If you have any issues, questions or concerns regarding your dice, please do get in touch at [email protected]
Thanks once again,
Jon & Oliver
and the Spidermind Games Team
The QC is finished and the pallets are on their way to Portland...
7 months ago
– Tue, Oct 03, 2023 at 09:32:29 AM
Why has it taken so long?
Having received and collated a number of reports of faulty dice from our Rest of the World fulfillment, we decided to engage a third party QC company to visually check every dice delivered to the US.
They have completed their check and they concluded that 38% of the dice failed inspection. This was a much larger number than is acceptable for us and it triggered a number of actions that we needed to take.
Initial contact with the factory had them accept liability and agree to replace any faulty dice straight away. As we were already ordering a second manufacturing run for our retail and wholesale orders, we added these numbers on to that print run. The dice have been ordered and a deposit paid, the process has been estimated at six weeks before these new dice are ready to be shipped.
In the meantime, the dice that are leaving the QC centre, will be fulfilled to backers as soon as the pallets arrive into Portland. We have been assured that this is imminent. We know that the QC has added time BUT the benefit of conducting this thorough review, will result in fewer reports of faulty dice from US and North American backers.
Whilst we had ordered excess dice in our first manufacturing run, to enable us to sell some dice through e-Commerce before the holiday season, this is now not going to be possible given the amount of faulty dice. As a result, some people will have their dice fulfilled directly from China (see below) and the bulk from Portland.
ROW replacements and fulfillment from China
As there has been a thirty percent report of substandard dice already received by the Rest of the World, we have reached an agreement with our manufacturing partners for them to handle all the replacements of faulty dice. We know some of you haven't heard back since uploading your Google form (anyone who has emailed would have been replied to) but please bear with us, as we are waiting on the manufacturing partners to confirm how they will be replacing each and every order. They have assured us they will be contacting you all and as we mentioned above, the replacement dice are being made now. We very much appreciate your patience.
As a small independent creator, these extra costs have been building up over the past two years and we were simply not in a position to be able to shoulder these on our own. As a result we began looking & successfully found investment for Spidermind Games. This investment will allow us to get these dice to you, extend our product range and increase the speed of release and delivery on new products. Yes, brand new innovations can take longer to get right, but two years in development was too long for many backers and way too costly for us.
With the fulfillment of the bulk of the dice beginning soon, and with some solid investment behind us we are in a great place to fix the issues with already fulfilled dice, to prevent a similar thing from happening again and to launch some amazing products to secure the company’s future.
Thank you all for your help and patience whilst we sorted this challenging situation out, and we are looking forward to getting the final part of the fulfilment done as soon as possible.
The next update will be when we have a date that the fulfillment can begin, we are aiming to have this update out next week.
More soon
Jon & Oliver
and the Spidermind team
Quality check is underway
8 months ago
– Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 11:58:53 AM
As a lot of you have seen, the boat got to Seattle safe and sound and the container has cleared customs. Hoorah!
With every manufacturing project we have undertaken (Level Up & Ice Dice), we have used the same product development company to help prove the concept, produce the prototypes & find the appropriate factories. We are now working with this same company to fix the issues that have arisen from the dice factory. As a result, the visual QC check is underway, in Seattle and as soon as this independent QC company give us the green light, the container will be driven to Oregon and fulfillment will commence.
Thanks to all of you from ROW for uploading any QC issues to the Google form. Sorry about the extra admin that you have gone through. Don't worry if you don't get anything back, your form would have been received and a 30 page document has come out of it, pulled together by the manufacturing partners. All the issues have been noted, recorded, shown to the factory and your replacements will be sent out as soon as we have fulfilled all the backers in the Americas.
To those of you who haven't received your dice yet, please rest assured that what we said we were going to do, we are doing. Your dice will be fulfilled as soon as the container arrives into Oregon. *We are deliberately not giving an exact date in this update and we don't have it ourselves, but we do not foresee it taking too long as we have paid for an entire team of people, *one of whom has turned out to be a backer himself.
More information will follow as soon as we have it.
Thanks
Jon & Oliver
and the Spidermind Team
Feedback from the Manufacturing Partners and Factory
9 months ago
– Tue, Jul 25, 2023 at 11:40:39 AM
A huge thanks to all those who have received their dice and given us their feedback. For just under 8%* of those sets already received there are quality issues which we will address in this update.
*(201 from 2,600 Backers fulfilled 7.69%)
What are the issues?
We would like to begin by offering a huge apology to all those who have received their dice and have discovered them to be far from the product they had hoped for. As soon as we received this feedback, we implemented a reporting system to deal with this and to report back to the factory that made the dice.
The issues we have seen are a mixture of placement errors for the eyes, yellowing of the clear resin, scratches on the surface, bubbles and other debris, misplaced ‘pips’, and some dice that are misshaped.
Whatever the fault in the dice, our commitment is to put this right for the individual backer and to use this feedback to further improve on the manufacturing process.
Dead Centre Technology
With the errors being reported some people have challenged the idea of using the term ‘Dead Centre Technology’, most especially when there is a possible tolerance of up to 1mm in the placement of the gemstone.
First a little explanation of where the name ‘Dead Centre’ came from. When we first looked at taking this project to Kickstarter, we knew we needed to protect the IP as soon as we could. This was a process that had never been tried before, as no dice manufacturer has even got close to being able to place an object in the middle of the die and orientate that object to look out thorough the highest number and replicate this on a massive scale.
Protection was vital most especially before showing our designs to a factory based in China. Dead Centre was the phrase chosen as at that time, as we had been able to create that process in small batches through our engineer. At the time the name was chosen we hadn’t yet begun mass manufacturing.
Some might argue with the benefit of hindsight, we should have gone for ‘centred’ technology rather than using the term dead centre. Why didn’t we? Because we had tried the process on small batches and the number of failures was tiny. We felt confident that this would be the same when mass manufacturing.
The error rate in the first run of these new dice is more than expected, so a number of actions have been put in place to address this.
Here’s what we are going to do:
1) As already mentioned, we are going to replace all faulty dice. The link to the google doc to report any faults is here. Once we have received all the reports, we will be sending information to each backer concerned as to their next steps.
2) For the impending arrival of the container into the US, we will be supplying a crew, in conjunction with our manufacturing partners, who will conduct a 100% visual check on every set of dice due. This will be done as the fulfilment takes place and shouldn’t delay the process.
The factory are already in the process of producing individual dice to act as replacements for any faulty dice and these will be sent via air freight to the US.
3) Stop the errors from happening again. So far, the feedback from the factory and our manufacturing partners is as follows:
· Agate stone placement: The factory had already identified and reduced the instances of physical movement of the curing dice. This included where a tray of the poured resin was then placed in the vacuum chamber. In any human interaction with the trays there is always a possibility of a sudden movement knocking the agate stones a little out of place. We already knew there were going to be tolerances in the manufacturing process (as first discussed in update 13) but where the stone had shifted significantly, this should not have passed QC.
· Orientation of the IRIS. Currently this part of the manufacturing process is done by hand and so there will always be a possibility of a small variation (as explained in update 13). The factory will be looking automating this in the future. However, hand placement is part of the current process of manufacturing. Saying that, where the orientation is not out through the correct surface then we will replace that die.
· Yellow Resin. We have been told that this was a mistake and used in the manufacture of a small number of the dice. This only affected a small number of the first run. Anyone with a yellow hue in the clear dice (Goddess and White Dragon) will have these sets replaced.
· Bubbles and scratches: These are another issue we have been told affected a batch at the beginning of the process and do not affect the later sets. Again, these will be replaced where required.
Although we are aware these things shouldn’t have happened, what we are keen to do now is to work with our manufacturing partners and the factory they work with, to rectify the issue as swiftly as we can.
What we are not going to do:
· Give up. This is the first time this process has ever been tried on a mass manufacturing scale and whilst the majority of people have received the dice they expected, the percentage of those who have not, to us, is unacceptably high.
For those who have not yet received their dice.
For the Rest of the World: As of Friday, there were approx 500 parcels to fulfil to the rest of the world (i.e not the Americas). Although, we are not in direct contact with the 3PL (this is being arranged by our manufacturing partner) we have requested a final figure from them and clarification as to whether preorders have been fulfilled from Asia or whether they will be sent from the US. We are working on this and will update you as soon as we have the information.
For North America: The container is on its way, a full 100% QC process will review every set before it is sent out and replacement dice are already being made. The picking and packing team at our fulfilment warehouse will be supplemented by extra pairs of eyes to review each box before it is packed without causing delay.
It has always been our plan to offer a ‘pick and mix’ option of loose dice once the KS has been fulfilled. This will be a new page on our site where people can add to their sets already backed during the campaign. These boxes of loose dice will also be used for QC replacements, and themselves be inspected before being posted.
Kickstarter Backers have made this possible.
We are not only hugely grateful for every backer who helped us bring this project to life, but we are also excited at what this new process has to offer. Is it perfect? Not for everyone but you guys are our lifeblood. So, we will not rest until those who need them have replacements, and we have a process that makes more of the amazing dice many of you have already received.
Many thanks,
Jon & Oliver
And the rest of the Spidermind Games team.
